In his latest post Ulf Wendel looks at the performance issues around the recently introduced MySQL Fabric support included in the mysqlnd extension.

PECL/mysqlnd_ms 1.6 is currently being modified to support sharding and fully automatic server and client failover when using MySQL Fabric (slides) to manage a farm of MySQL servers. PECL/mysqlnd_ms is a mostly transparent load balancer that works with all PHP MySQL APIs (PDO_MySQL, mysqli, ...). The idea is, that if, for example, a MySQL server fails, the plugin talks to MySQL Fabric to learn about alternative servers that Fabric has provisioned automatically. This "talks to" gives implies a performance penalty for applications.

He takes a look at what's happening "behind the scenes" when it comes to using the Fabric functionality and sharding (based on the use of mysqlnd_ms_select_shard). He traces through the execution path and how much slower then end result is. He includes some results from the connection debugging and the number of queries a single request makes.

Johannes Schlüter has a new post to his site today showing how to use the MySQL Fabric functionality to do sharding in your PHP application. The MySQL Fabric (recently released) is "an integrated environment for managing a farm of MySQL server supporting high-availability and sharding."

As this release of Fabric put the focus on sharding, this is what I want to show here, too. A general introduction to MySQL Fabric and its sharding features can be found on VN's blog so I'll be quite fast in some areas, for details please refer to the documentation and the mentiond blogs.

He walks you through the installation of the support for Fabric and how to configure it for storage. He then creates some groupings/shards with the "mysqlfabric" command line tool and sets up the sharding rules. Next up is the installation of the mysqlnd_ms extension for PHP and configuring it via a JSON file and in the php.ini. A sample test script is included showing how to create a table, insert a record and pull it back out from the sharded setup.

In a new post to his blog today Kevin Schroeder answers a question about a product his employer, Zend currently offers - what is phpcloud.com?

Well that's a stupid question, isn't it? It's "Development done right", "Fast, Elastic, Dependable" and on "Any Cloud", right? If you are unclear as to what phpcloud.com is, what the Zend Application Fabric is and what the DevCloud is then this is a good post for you.

The phpcloud platform offers their own Zend Application fabric to provide resources based on the needs at the time and the DevCloud, a "slice" of these resources for you to try out for your development.

So, the Fabric is the loom, DevCloud is a thread spool and phpcloud.com is the lever you pull to start.